A lone salaryman walks in to a room with bento in hand and sits down at a table to enjoy his lunch in privacy. He unties the knot holding together the bandana bundle to reveal a small brown bento box and chopsticks case. Finally, the man removes the lid from the bento to unveil a mouth-watering assortment of…colored yarn?

You’d think that when someone at Nestle proposed making a Kit Kat ice cream cone, they would have taken the conventional route and used ice cream with crushed up bits of Kit Kat in it.

But that was not the case with the frozen treat we came across at a supermarket during a recent trip to Sakhalin. Instead, this “Kit Kat Cone” was nothing more than a regular store-bought ice cream cone with a single Kit Kat wedged in the top.

Some talented baristas are able to draw beautiful patterns or designs on the surface of a latte. This “latte art” isn’t easy to pull off, but the extra artistic effort is sure to captivate customers and keep them coming back for more.

That doesn’t just apply to cafés, either: in Osaka, there is an okonomiyaki shop where the chef enchants locals and tourists alike with stunning displays of mayonnaise art.

If you’re unfamiliar with okonomiyaki, you need to stop reading this article, head to your nearest Japanese restaurant and introduce yourself because you have been missing out. Often referred to as a “Japanese pancake” or “Japanese pizza,” okonomiyaki is of conglomeration of veggies, meat and whatever else you want grilled in batter and topped with, among other things, sweet okonomiyaki sauce and mayonnaise.

Osaka in particular is proud of its style of okonomiyaki and this particular restaurant, “Okaru”, is said to hold a favorable reputation with the locals. If Osakans approve than you know it must good—and you get a bit of entertainment to boot!

So just how skilled is this condiment technician? We visited Okaru to find out!

On April 26 1986 several explosions caused a fire at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine that sent a radioactive plume across large parts of the Soviet Union and Western Europe. It became the first level 7 nuclear disaster until the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in 2011 and remains the worst nuclear accident in history.

Today, over a quarter-century since the disaster, workers continue to tread through the 30-km exclusion zone in hazmat suits every day to construct a new concrete shield around the deteriorating sarcophagus built in 1986 that holds the still-radioactive core.

There’s no question that a wasteland commute followed by a day spent laboring in a bulky suit and ventilation mask doesn’t make for ideal working conditions. However, there is one saving grace for the brave workers at Chernobyl: delicious meals at the employee cafeteria.

Our globetrotting correspondent Kuzo recently visited Ukraine, where he had the opportunity to dine at the Chernobyl cafeteria. Kuzo writes: “The meals at the cafeteria are all authentic Ukrainian cuisine. Even the Ukrainian woman I was traveling with told me with confidence that the food there is great.”

Despite my own personal hatred for this beverage that tastes like vomit chilled in the freezer for 30 minutes, it was good to see people get into this otherwise healthy drink.

Sadly, it looks as if this fad has run its course, based on the latest tomato juice based research sponsored by juice maker Kagome. Coroners have estimated the time of death for the fad to be 9:20pm on July 2nd.

Okay, it’s a fact that the Japanese love “gyu-don“— braised beef and onions on rice, sometimes topped with a raw egg. All over Japan, you can find a gyudon shop on almost every street. But what if you’re in a mood for something other than a beef rice bowl? Well, we’ve found a shop that offers an excellent alternative, “buta-don“, or pork on rice. And we’re not talking about just any regular buta-don. At this shop, you can order an extra-large buta-don that really piles the pork on – so much, in fact, that you can barely see the bowl beneath all the pork! Read More

Tunisia as we recently discovered by their beautiful can designs, seems to be a loadstone of Coca-Cola related paranormal activity. For now our intrepid reporter has found a camel renowned for its love of Coke. It chugs the stuff down in one swig!

There’s this new potsticker (aka gyza, aka dumpling) restaurant that opened in Paris, that people are actually lining up to get into. We wondered what all the fuss was about, so we went there to check it out ourselves. Read More

You may think it’s crazy to voluntarily eat poisonous fish, but in the case of pufferfish, or “fugu” in Japanese, it’s something the Japanese have been doing for a long time. We understand how the idea of eating a potentially deadly poisonous fish could be off-putting to some, but most Japanese people wouldn’t think twice about going to a restaurant and having pufferfish; in fact most of us would welcome it as a treat, as a full-course fugu meal usually doesn’t come cheap. Well, this time, we have a story from one of the reporters at the Pouch website about an unusual way to have pufferfish, and this is definitely a recipe you won’t be able to recreate at home! Read More

We’ve previously reported to you on Gundam-themed products that you can wear (without looking geeky), or eat in the form of green tofu. And now, there’s going to be a Gundam product that you can drink! Fans of the popular Japanese anime will be delighted to hear that a new soda featuring Gundam images will be coming out in early August, and judging from the picture that has been released, the cans look awesome! Read More

It’s certainly become a widespread belief that dog is eaten in some Asian countries, most notably China and Korea. However, it never caught on in Japan, which is why we were blown away to learn that there’s a restaurant in Ikebukuro, Tokyo that offers a selection of dog meat dishes.

The name of the restaurant is Fun Fun Shop and despite the signboard that reads “Chinese Cooking” they actually offer a range of dishes into Korean and Japanese as well. Having none of us ever eaten dog before, we sent our most iron-gutted reporters to see if the taste could possibly justify the unpleasant act of eating man’s best friend. And we answered your three most likely questions, before you ask them!

Let me describe a scene for you: a crowd of Japanese are gathered around steel drums in a little shanty of a building open to the summer air. Some are drinking beers in plastic cups, others disposable one-cup sakes. Most are eating from unheated cans of food with plastic cutlery, chasing it with sips of their chosen brew. Around them are shelves of unfinished wood, stacked high with a stupendous assortment of cans, probably enough to last several months. Think this is a scene from a disaster shelter in Tohoku? Perhaps an end-of-the-world movie? Think again. It’s Saturday night at one of Osaka’s most unique “restaurants”, the long-standing and popular Kanso, where there’s no menu except the cans on the shelves. Try to contain your excitement, because this monument to apocalypse-chic may be coming to a city near you. Read More

Whether it’s a savory slab of salmon, or a sweet cheesecake, lemon juice can enhance a multitude of foods. But the squeezing of lemons to get their fresh juice is often tedious and seems to bear little reward. How do you all normally squeeze lemons? Most people typically cut it in half and get to squeezing straight away. But there’s a method that will yield much much much more juice, as we present below: Read More

Coca-Cola is probably the most popular brand name beverage on Earth, and as a result it pops up seemingly everywhere you go. A fun side effect of this level of popularity is to see the metamorphoses the product goes through as it crosses borders around the world.

Our correspondent has traveled to the birthplace of the Arab Spring end unearthed such a treasure. Behold the Tunisian can of Coca-Cola Zero (the calorie-free version of Coke).

It’s safe to say Evian is the most popular brand of bottled water one the market today. It’s also well known that the water is said to come from various collection points of a spring around Évian-les-Bains (Evian for short).

However, the metaphysical question of the day is, do people in Evian drink Evian? Rumor has it that all through the town, the water is readily available for free, and no one ever buys it. RocketNews went in to answer this and deeper questions.

Gourmet cooking isn’t just about flavor and texture; it’s also about presentation. A little ingenuity and artistic sense can bring a dish to life, providing a feast for the eyes before the food even reaches your mouth.

However, a certain Chinese dish prepared by sodomizing a chicken with a bamboo tube and then boiling it has recently become the butt of an internet joke for showing what happens when such ingenuity is mixed with a sick sense of humor.

Legend has it that in China there exists a frozen treat so incredibly powerful that it never melts, even if left in room temperature. RocketNews sent a reporter into the mysterious country to learn more about this potent popsicle of the gods.

The following takes place between 3:40pm and 6:50pm. Events occur in real time… if you’re really slow at reading.